Re: perl, perl-devel, and missing config.h

[Robin Norwood <rnorwood redhat com>]

Michael Tiemann <tiemann redhat com> writes:

> On Mon, 2007-03-05 at 12:18 -0500, Robin Norwood wrote:
>> Hi,
>
>> However, one change has been pretty controversial.  In accordance with
>> standard Fedora packaging, he split the C header files into a
>> perl-devel package.  These files aren't needed to run perl modules,
>> but they are needed to build many perl modules, both in Core and
>> Extras.  Unfortunately, when I accepted the new spec file and built it
>> into rawhide, I didn't think through the consequences fully, and we
>> ended up breaking a lot of builds.  It was generally not very obvious
>> *why* the builds were breaking, leading to much frustration[2].
>
> My $0.02: now that the reason is known, and known to be a direct
> consequence of Following The Specs, it seems to me that adding the 
> -devel requirement to packages that do, indeed, need -devel is The Right
> Thing.  I, for one, am always happy to see a more clear and clean
> distinction between the -devel and the non-devel worlds.

I don't think any of the people disagreeing with this change mind
splitting devel/non-devel - the problems we're facing now revolve around
the fact that splitting the 'devel' bits out tend to pull things that
people expect to be in a normal perl distribution - like CPAN, for
instance.  We're still fighting about how to make this work.

-RN

-- 
Robin Norwood
Red Hat, Inc.

"The Sage does nothing, yet nothing remains undone."
-Lao Tzu, Te Tao Ching